Community Update

I may well be accused of a lack of empathy for sharing the following thoughts, but that would not be true. I have empathy, but right now anger is overshadowing that empathy. I have been struggling for the last couple of days with the news of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's death from a drug overdose. He was a fine actor but clearly a very troubled man.  The media seems to love the mental image of this Academy award winning actor being found with a syringe in his arm and 65 bags of heroin in his home.  Such details sell.  It is always a tragedy when a person dies too young. This death is hyped by the media to somehow make it seem that this death mattered more because it was someone famous and talented.   Why are we lionizing a man who may have been the finest actor of his generation but at the end was nothing more than another junkie with a needle in his arm?
For me, I have been fighting very real anger. I am angry at this man who was described as a "dedicated father" yet left three children fatherless. Regardless of any protestations to the contrary, he was more dedicated to his addiction than to his children.  He was given a talent that others could only hope to have, a talent that by its very nature presumes the owner  to understand a bit about human nature.  Yet he clearly did not understand his own human nature.  His addiction blotted out any self awareness he might have had.  And there is the point.  For an addict their addiction takes precedence over EVERYTHING.  They may be functioning in the day to day world, go to work, take their children to school, even pay their bills on time,  but trust me when I tell you that every minute of every day their overriding thought is not whether or not they are doing a good job, whether or not their children are at school on time or if the lights in the house are going to stay on.  Their every thought is how they are going to get their next drink, cook their next fix or make their next sports bet.  Don't let their talent or kindness or seeming success in life fool you. 
The byproducts of other people's  addictions have touched me for most of my life and it is only now as I head into old age that I see how good the addicts were at pulling the wool over my eyes.  It has taken me a long time to understand how I was manipulated. The blinders I wore allowed me to believe the decent core that I knew was once there was still there. It was not. Addiction had obliterated it. Unfortunately those same blinders allowed the addicts free rein to take advantage of anyone they could,  emotionally and financially.  It's as ugly as the picture of Philip Seymour Hoffman on a bathroom floor with a needle in his arm.
So I am angry.  Angry at addiction and the hold it has on people, angry at the damage it does to families, particularly innocent children, and angry at yet another talented person throwing it all away in search of a high that will in fact take them about as low as one can go.  I hope Mr. Hoffman will rest in peace.  It is his children and the others who loved him who will suffer now.